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The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. The opinions and interests expressed on this employee blog are the employees' own and don't necessarily represent EMC's positions, strategies or views. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion.

IDC published their key findings from the annual Digital Universe study (sponsored by EMC), highlighting just how much information we’re all creating and using. In EMC’s press release, we highlighted the following: “Information Taming” technologies are driving down the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information—one-sixth the cost in 2011 versus 2005.” Information Taming Technologies! What a name!

I would consider the SourceOne family of Information Governance products to be “information taming technologies.” For example, SourceOne products can help archive inactive content from production environments. This leads to improved application performance, improved backup operations and reduced costs through tiered storage – all while preserving the user experience. If those benefits are delivered, I would say Continue reading →

How many of you have gotten lost recently? Did you print out directions beforehand? Did you have to stop and ask for directions? Or maybe, the reality is that it’s been a while since you’ve gotten lost. Perhaps you are a person who relies on the accuracy and convenience of your GPS (global positioning system) device. With millions sold, whether you personally use a device or not, you’ve undoubtedly heard someone extol the virtues of this powerful device.

What if the same ease of navigation could be applied to Information Governance in the workplace? No maps to print out, no need to ask for directions but instead a seamless, transparent and seemingly effortless way for end-users to navigate through the twists and turns of growing mailbox volumes, varying retention schedules and information search and retrieval.

One of the biggest concerns I hear from organizations embarking on an information governance strategy is “How do I implement information governance controls without disrupting worker productivity?” It’s a delicate balance to be achieved but EMC SourceOne is designed to enable your workers to work more productively while enabling good information governance. Here’s a sampling of how:

EMC SourceOne Email Management enables governance policies to be consistently applied and enforced transparently to the end user. End users continue to work in their application, or from their device of choice, to manage their email effectively through the benefits of an infinite mailbox and can easily search for archived content. The end result is an uninterrupted work experience for the end user with governance and information management policies being applied largely behind the scenes.

Avoid the "Dead End" of Email Capacity

The infinite mailbox: For many organizations, gaining control over email is a top priority. Yet, end users spend time needlessly grappling with the usual way organizations impose control – the dreaded mailbox capacity quota! For end users, the mailbox quota is equivalent to hitting a dead-end street! To avoid this dead-end, workers create personal email folders on their laptops and desktops so they can file emails they want to retain. And, when their mailbox reaches capacity, they quickly delete old or unimportant emails to get their inbox below the threshold. As an organization, that should scare you a bit. How can you be sure that the email that they are furiously deleting (because of course, they have an urgent email that must be sent immediately and their email is frozen) is really old and irrelevant and not an email containing the final contract or some other business record that should be retained? And how will you know where to find all those personally archived files if you need to preserve them later on?

EMC SourceOne Email Management solves the problem of restrictive mailbox quotas. It offers transparent access to archived messages while reducing the amount of information on the messaging server, providing a virtually “infinite” mailbox capacity for the user. Through “shortcutting”, message attachments (and optionally the message body) of older emails can be removed and replaced with a small pointer that leads to the archived file. Users maintain transparent access to the stored information while administrators reduce the amount of data that sits on primary storage.

Transparent Retention: Consistently applying and enforcing retention is another area of challenging “on-ramps and exits” for organizations to navigate through. Some organizations enable the end users to make decisions on whether an email or other content should be retained or not. Compounding the problem is the situation where end users have to determine which retention period to apply to the content. This is extremely time consuming and disruptive to the end user and can lead to inconsistency across the organization. Inconsistency in applying and enforcing retention increases organizational risk due to lack of compliance or an inability to produce key information that should’ve been (but wasn’t) retained. Bottom line, organizations must ensure that retention policies are consistently applied and enforced. But how to do it?

With EMC SourceOne Email Management, your organizational retention policies can be applied to folders. (For example, all content placed in the contracts folder will be retained for 7 years.) All content that is moved to that folder will inherit the retention policies associated with the folder. This enables multiple and varying retention policies to be applied to content across the organization in a manner completely transparent to the end user. If end users need to manually classify records – they can do it easily while ensuring consistency. Through a simple drag-and-drop within their inboxes, users can place messages into pre-defined archives with pre-set retention periods. This approach offers reassurance and risk avoidance, negates the need for users to keep local archives on the desktop, and minimizes calls to IT support for onerous restores.

These are just two examples of the types of seamless, transparent “GPS-like” navigational assistance, EMC SourceOne provides to end-users. By enabling corporate information governance policies to be applied consistently and seamlessly, worker productivity can be increased and governance mandates can be adhered to and enforced.